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David Conyers

Stephen Gaskell

Extreme Planets: A Science Fiction Anthology of Alien Worlds (Chaosium fiction) Paperback – February 18, 2014

by David Brin (Author), Stephen Gaskell (Author), David Conyers (Editor),

3.8 11 ratings

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Two decades ago astronomers confirmed the existence of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. Today more than 800 such worlds have been identified, and scientists now estimate that at least 160 billion star-bound planets are to be found in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. But more surprising is just how diverse and bizarre those worlds are.

Extreme Planets is a science fiction anthology of stories set on alien worlds that push the limits of what we once believed possible in a planetary environment. Visit the bizarre moons, dwarf planets and asteroids of our own Solar Systems, and in the deeper reaches of space encounter super-Earths with extreme gravity fields, carbon planets featuring mountain ranges of pure diamond, and ocean worlds shrouded by seas hundreds of kilometres thick. The challenges these environments present to the humans that explore and colonise them are many, and are the subject matter of these tales.

Cover illustration by Paul Drummond. The anthology features 15 tales from leading science fiction authors and rising stars in the genre:

"Banner of the Angels" by David Brin and Gregory Benford
"Brood" by Stephen Gaskell
"Haumea" by G. David Nordley
"A Perfect Day off the Farm" by Patty Jansen
"Daybreak" by Jeff Hecht
"Giants" by Peter Watts
"Maelstrom" by Kevin Ikenberry
"Murder on Centauri" by Robert J. Mendenhall
"The Flight of the Salamander" by Violet Addison and David Smith
"Petrochemical Skies" by David Conyers and David Kernot
"The Hyphal Layer" by Meryl Ferguson
"Colloidal Suspension" by Geoff Nelder
"Super-Earth Mother" by Guy Immega
"Lightime" by Jay Caselberg
"The Seventh Generation" by Brian Stableford

Print length

356 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Chaosium Inc.
Publication date

February 18, 2014
Dimensions

5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

1568823932
ISBN-13

978-1568823935
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"If you want to be transported across a rich and diverse selection of exo-planets and read some damn good writing to boot, you can do a lot worse than digging into your pocket and buying Extreme Planets." - Albedo One

"This is one of the most exciting short story collections on the market for some time. Not only is it relevant as far as the physics is concerned, it's connected humanly and emotionally to our own species as it travels out to these strange worlds." - Sfcrowsnest

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chaosium Inc.; First Edition (February 18, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 356 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1568823932
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1568823935
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,685,745 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #155,348 in Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.8 11 ratings

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David Conyers
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David Conyers is a science fiction author and editor living in Adelaide, South Australia. He completed a degree in engineering from the University of Melbourne, and today works as a tender writer in the construction industry.
David has published over fifty science fiction and horror short stories, won several awards for his writing, and edited five anthologies including one of the first fiction collections to explore the concepts of exoplanets, Extreme Planets. For over a decade he was the Arts and General Editor and reviewer for Albedo One magazine where he interviewed many top science fiction writers including Iain M. Banks, Greg Egan and Will McIntosh.
His extensive portfolio of Cthulhu Mythos fiction includes his popular Harrison Peel espionage versus the Elder Gods series, and for more than a decade he was a prolific contributor to the Call of Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game.
Today David writes contemporary thriller fiction novels under a pseudonym.
www.david-conyers.com | Free eBook: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/vejv0jli8a
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Stephen Gaskell
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Stephen Gaskell has published fiction in many of the world's top speculative fiction venues, including Writers of the Future, Interzone, Cosmos, Nature Futures, and Clarkesworld.
Stephen has an MPhys (Hons) degree in Physics from University College, Oxford, and an MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from the University of Sussex. He also holds a CELTA English teaching qualification, gained during the two years he lived in Budapest, Hungary.
He is currently working on his first novel, a post-apocalyptic thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. More of his work and thoughts can be found at stephengaskell.com.
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Geoff Nelder
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Geoff Nelder has one wife, two grown-up kids, and lives in rural England within easy cycle ride of the Welsh mountains.
Publications: One humorous thriller Escaping Reality in 2005
One award-winning science fiction, Exit, Pursued by a Bee in 2008
Another thriller, Hot Air, is published in 2009 after receiving an award from an Arts Academy in the Netherlands.
A science fiction trilogy, ARIA - starting with Left Luggage with an original premise is published in 2012 by LL-Publications.
Xaghra's Revenge, a historical fantasy set in the Maltese islands was published by Solstice Publishing in 2017
Having had around 90 short stories published, Geoff was chosen to be the short fiction judge for the Whittaker Prize, 2009.
He is the judge of the FicFun story competition 2018
Geoff was a co-editor of science fiction magazine, Escape Velocity, and is a freelance editor.
Geoff's website: geoffnelder.com
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Jay Caselberg
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Jay Caselberg was born in a country town in Australia and then traveled extensively while growing up and later for his dayjob. He writes across many genres, both at short story and novel length, crossing the boundaries of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, and the Literary, generally with a dark edge. He is currently based in Germany. You can find him at http://www.caselberg.net and on Facebook
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Robert J. Mendenhall
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Robert J. Mendenhall is retired Air Force, a retired police officer, and a former broadcast journalist for the American Forces Network, Europe. A member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, he writes across genres including science fiction, adventure, crime and suspense, and the occasional horror. He lives near St. Joseph, Michigan with his wife and fellow writer, Claire.
And many animals.
So many animals.
Web site: www.robertjmendenhall.com
Twitter: @robtjmendenhall
E-mail: robert@robertjmendenhall.com
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David N. Smith
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Meryl Ferguson
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Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5

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Zach

Unbalanced

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2014

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Some of these stories are real gems and are thoroughly enjoyable. Like many sci fi authors, though, some writers contained here are too impressed with their own mastery of jargon and unable to tell a tale that is both readable and understandable. I assume there must be a market for these indecipherable stories as these authors keep getting published. However, no anthology is ever perfect, and I would recommend this book for its good stories.

5 people found this helpful

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Troy Alexander Wolken

A Great Find

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2021

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Delivered in a timely fashion and containing the nuts-and-bolts charm Hard Scifi is known for.

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2014

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Average

One person found this helpful

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John Hancock

t very good.

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2014

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it wan.t very good.

2 people found this helpful

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Konstantine Paradias

A must-have for every hard sf fan!

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2014

Extreme Planets was a very hard sell for me, as I have never been all that into hard science fiction in general, as most examples of it (that I have read) were rambling tirades in theoretical physics that bored me to tears. Thankfully, Extreme Planets was the exception. With more than a dozen stories by exceptionally telented authors, Extreme Planets is one of the better purchases (anthology-wise) that you could make.

Banner of the Angels is a disaster-thriller, featuring near-catastrophic systems failures in space and resourceful engineers saving the day.

Brood is Aliens on steroids, minus the guns-solve-everything mentality.

Haumea is a story of mutiny, of tiny exo-planets and pretty much everything that could go wrong in an interstellar journey.

A Perfect day Off the Farm is Shawshank Redemption in Hard SF space, where no-one is going to stop you, if you ever decide you want out.

Daybreak was among my favorite stories in the anthology. I wouldn't want to give too much away, so let's just say that if movies about stranded, doomed astronauts ever go back into fashion, this is the way to do it.

Giants is Wattsian hard sf, which is one of the very few examples of hard sf that I have so far handled with any degree of success. Unfortunately, it is a sequel of sorts to another one of his works (I think it is the Island) which makes it a necessary read beforehand.

Maelstrom. If the word 'Science Time' is ever made into a t-shirt, this story should be held responsible for it. Another favorite of mine.

Murder on Centauri is a murder mystery in an inhospitable alien world. The paranoia of Carpanter's the Thing, with a touch of Ice Station Zebra.

Flight of the Salamander is alien body-hopping, weird vistas and brain-gripping awesomeness all the way through.

Petrochemical Skies is a classic example of Conyers-Kernot in action. I have a soft spot for their Peel/Ash crossovers and this story was a loose easter egg hunt of a number of plot points in their general continuity, but a highly entertaining story nonetheless.

The Hyphal Layer and Colloidal SuSpension are stories revolving around impossible lifeforms in distant planets, both of them depicting the complexity of strange, alien environments and the implications of human meddling.

Super-Earth Mother is a story about a lost, lonely AI that rebuilds mankind to survive in a colorful, vast, exo-planet and her meddling in the first steps of forming their society in an otherwise inhospitable world. Another one of my favorites.

Lightime is a story about how the strange day-cycle of a distant planet can mess with your head. Delicious man vs hostile unforgiving enironment action.

Seventh Generation is, oddly enough, a story about families and how they will be altered to survive in the harsh environment of a new and impossible world.

13 people found this helpful

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R. MacDonald

A good read

Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2014

Way back in the 1960s the only solar system we really knew about was our own and despite there being billions of stars in the Milky Way and beyond, the existence of other planetary systems was a matter of sheer speculation. While it was possible to investigate stars of all spectral types to gain information about size, temperature, rotation and elemental composition, looking deeper to see if there were planets orbiting them was just beyond the capabilities of the time. With the advancement of electronic techniques, computers and satellite technology, all that has changed. The Kepler space telescope revolutionised our opinions! One technique involved the measurement of tiny fluctuations in the brightness of candidate stars which showed that bodies were orbiting around them. By this method and several others involving ground-based telescopes, at the beginning of 2014 it’s now known that 1800 extrasolar planets probably exist.

Astronomers are still scratching their heads when contemplating the information gleaned from these techniques because all the ideas of planetary formation have been swept aside. Instead of large planets being further from the star, as the case exists in our own solar system, they are usually found uncomfortably close. Smaller planets not far removed from the size of the Earth were discovered with some of them in habitable zones where the possibilities of life-giving water in liquid state would exist. Science Fiction writers have for many years conjured up all sorts of planets everywhere in the universe but now, for the first time they actually have real places and real scenarios on which to base their action. With this in mind, the book “Extreme Planets” has been released which describes the adventures which could await us in the future when we begin to venture to these other worlds.

Yes, “Extreme Planets” takes us on a great expeditionary journey to a variety of these planets. Edited by David Conyers, David Kernot and Jeff Harris this is a collection of 15 stories, meaty and substantial stories at that, spanning 350 pages. All but one of the stories was written especially for this volume so here we have something new and relevant with up-to-date information. While it is fictional and adventurous, it’s all based on what we think is out there and what we think is fact. I found it to be a really good read, one which was difficult to put down, and in this review I will go over some of the stories which grabbed my attention most.

The Flight of the Salamander by Violet Addison and David Smith involved a mind transplant of a woman scientist into the body of flying salamander. The planet was dying, ripped apart by volcanic eruptions and yet it was being exploited by humans for minerals. A blue supergiant star threatened to engulf the world in fiery doom, making this an entirely unpleasant environment. Problems arose when the scientist could not get back to her own body which was encapsulated in a ship which had crash landed on the barren surface. She then had to choose between her own personal safety or the lives of the other surviving humans!

Petrochemical Skies by David Conyers and David Kernot had great characters and a wonderful setting for the story, that being a super-sized Earth which had an eccentric orbit around a hot star giving periods of intense heat and then cold. Survival on the surface was impossible unless special suits were employed, suits that could fly through the dense atmosphere and swim through seas of chemical sludge. Jenna was the astro navigator on board the ship that was trying to outdo others in a race to provide services for another planet. She was inexperienced and somewhat immature, bullied by the captain and condescendingly treated by others. Things didn’t get better when she crashed into the planet, losing the artificially intelligent hyperdrive, jeopardising the entire mission.

Trying to find the hyperdrive was problematic because it involved an immense journey around the planet. Unfortunately it was found in one of the seas which maybe harboured a type of primitive life residing within its murky depths. This carbon rich planet was covered with diamonds and the skies were saturated with hydrocarbons, making it a world of plenty for people like ourselves but to these entrepreneurs of the future, other things were more important. How would Jenna survive? Would her indecisive nature and inexperience be the undoing of them all?

Brian Stableford’s story, The Seventh Generation, can be described quite simply as magnificent! What a great writer he is! Superlatives notwithstanding, this well-known author takes us to the far distant future of our own planet. A couple of scientists, Corcoran and Halleck, by all accounts a couple of miserable middle-aged gentleman, meet up to discuss an experiment which will project one of them into the future. In this experiment the actual person is not sent to the future, rather it is a conscious ghost which will nonetheless be able to interact to some extent with the environment. It’s a dangerous experiment but Corcoran has tried it before and this time wishes to proceed even further, to the stage when the sun has turned to a red giant, about 5 billion years in the future.

Without wishing to give away too much of the story, it seems that there could be several generations awaiting us in the future. Mankind disappears and other forms of life take over. The process which scientists go through to discover this future is exciting and dramatic and yet, it’s oddly quaint in a British sense. It’s one that you must definitely read!

As mentioned, 15 stories transporting you to many different planets and environments out there in the Galaxy, from comets and asteroids in our solar system to worlds completely covered in water and, in another case, something resembling soup. There are blue giant stars of intense radiation, red dwarfs and a strange world living in the realms of a white dwarf star where the quest for sunlight is but a vain attempt to survive. This is one of the most exciting short story collections on the market for some time. Not only is it relevant as far as the physics is concerned, it’s connected humanly and emotionally to our own species as it travels out to these strange worlds. One not to miss!

6 people found this helpful

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Dave Anderson

Space Ants, Diamond Mountains, Comets, Extreme Creatures and more!

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2014

Someone noted, in an earlier review, that the story BROOD, by Stephen Gaskell, was like "Aliens without the guns". I'll have to disagree with that, because other than the creatures having acid blood, the critters in BROOD are very far from Gieger's ALIEN creature. Why would I open the review like this? SPACE ANTS, that's why. But not just 'space ants' in a science fiction B-Movie type of way, this is hard science fiction, and by that I mean HONEST TO GOODNESS CLASSIC STYLE STUFF. BROOD will have you practically cheering by the end of the story.

There are more creatures, exotic locales, and nerdy, descriptive science action within. "Petrochemical Skies" by David Conyers and David Kernot had some really cool creatures AND a cool locale -- a diamond planet that rains oil! "Banner of the Angels" by David Brin and Gregory Benford, is a story with some of the best described, accurate 'space talk' I've ever read. Everything seemed so real.

Brin also writes a poignant introduction and Conyers and co. are on point with the editing.

If you read YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION or its ilk (hard science fiction anthos) this may be a very good option for you.

4 people found this helpful

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Extreme Planets: A Science Fiction Anthology of Alien Worlds (Chaosium fiction) Paperback – February 18, 2014

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David Conyers

Stephen Gaskell

Geoff Nelder

Jay Caselberg

Robert J. Mendenhall

David N. Smith

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